Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

One of Ford’s assignments was to identify such allies and try to win them over. In his first month on the job, he traveled to Fallujah and arranged meetings with U.S. military commanders and Arab diplomats to get a sense of the task ahead of him. It was worse than he imagined. In Fallujah, the capital of the insurgency and traditionally the most rebellious city in Iraq, townspeople were in no mood to negotiate. The marines picked off occasional targets from their base on the outskirts of town, but most of the city remained a “denied area” to Americans in the weeks after the killing of the four American security contractors, officers told Ford. “Insurgents and foreign fighters largely operate without constraint within the city,” read a classified State Department cable describing Ford’s meeting with the marines. “Coalition forces are still seeking to disrupt insurgents and foreign jihadists with surgical strikes against Abu Musab al Zarqawi–related targets within the town in order to prevent Fallujah from operating as a safe-haven for extremists.” A Jordanian diplomat with extensive contacts within the Sunni tribes described the situation as all but hopeless. Sunnis remained bitterly opposed to the American presence in Iraq, and though some were conflicted about the presence of foreign insurgents, others welcomed them as a bulwark against persecution by Shiite militias seeking to settle scores after decades of Sunni rule. Out of desperation, some tribal elders had even take...